Month: April 2015

With the first detailed observations through imaging interferometry of a lava lake on Io, Jupiter’s innermost Galilean moon, the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory places itself as the forerunner of the next generation of extremely large telescopes.

As five impact craters on Mercury receive names, NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft is about to create another, since it has run out of propellant and is predicted to impact on the surface of the planet at 8:26 pm BST today.

Bok globules are dark knots of gas and dust in larger molecular clouds that we see today. New theoretical work shows that similar islands of gas enriched in heavy elements in the early universe could have held as much water vapour as we find in our galaxy today.

Researchers at the University of Waterloo in Canada have created a spherical 3-D map of the universe spanning nearly two billion light-years that is the most complete picture of our cosmic neighbourhood to date.

The NameExoWorlds contest, organised by the International Astronomical Union and Zooniverse, is now entering its next stage. Fifteen stars and 32 planets have been made available for naming proposals from registered clubs and non-profit organisations.

The United States Naval Observatory’s Robotic Astrometric Telescope (URAT) near Flagstaff, Arizona began to systematically image the sky every clear night for a period of just over two years, culminating in the URAT1 catalogue of precise positional data on about 228 million stars.